New Orleans Stories: Don

[Editor's note: this is the second in an ongoing series of oral histories from survivors of Hurricane Katrina. You can download a clip from Don's story, and to listen to more histories, please visit Alive in Truth.]

Don is a 48-year-old artist and photographer who worked for eight days saving elderly residents from his flooded neighborhood in New Orleans. Don and his friends brought over 300 people to safety in a school. He was airlifted to Camp Otis Air Force Base in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

This story was recorded by Sarah Yahm, a documentarian with Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster Oral History and Memory Project. Alive in Truth is an all-volunteer oral history and witnessing project led by poet Abe Louise Young. (If you would like to support their work, please donate online at Austin Community Foundation and specify "Alive in Truth.")

I was well-stocked with food. A lot of clean water, drinkable water, and water to bathe with -- I prepared for it. I had a little battery-operated television, a little battery-operated CD player, and an extensive CD collection. Primarily jazz. Progressive and modern stuff, you know, and some of the classics. Big Coltrane fan. Miles fan. At night I would go out on the balcony and just let the music wash over me, you know. No light pollution anywhere, virtually no noise. It was wonderful, actually, to experience that in New Orleans, which is usually very loud. You can't ever see the stars for the lights, you know.

I entertained myself a lot. I would sing to this German Shepard across the street. He was really big and rather ferocious so I didn't want to save him. You know I kept him alive. I fed him and I would sing to him at night. The dog appreciated it and so did I. He was a great dog and I hope he made it. I had to leave him behind. Nobody wanted to save this dog. He was huge. He was not friendly. I left him on two steps of a door entrance hovering over the water. So I'm not sure.

Yeah. I'll really start it at the beginning. I wake up the morning of the flood. I saw the flooding start the night before and my brother-in-law was with me at the time. We had just eaten dinner and the hurricane pretty much subsided. We'd breezed through that and were like oh, okay it's over. No big deal, lights are out and no power left.

I had rigged up a way to cook. I was using Sterno heating cans as my stove and I'd taken the iron grating off the stove and I was cooking hot meals. So we ate dinner and we're sitting there and then we hear the water coming into the house, but we couldn't figure out what the sound was. Well, it was coming up through the floor in the bottom of the house, through the tiles, and we saw that. It really surprised us. To cut that short, by the next morning there was six and a half feet of water in the house and fourteen feet outside.

Well, the very morning we're up a friend and neighbor that I know comes around on his boat and he's got his family and two small children. His name is Wimpy, and he stops and shouts. I got on the balcony and he's like, "Don, we can't stay! I've got these little kids. We got to go. If you want the boat take the ride with me and I'll give you the boat. Of course in fourteen feet of water I was like, yeah. So my brother-in-law looks at me and he's like, "Man, I'm gonna leave, I can't stay." And I was like, "Thank you." I was so glad he did that. So we get in the boat and leave.

We get to the highway at the foot of Franklin Avenue and the I-10 upramp, which was the only dry embarkation place. He gets off the boat, the family unloads off the boat, I get off, we tie it up. I saw one search and rescue crew. They happened to be there because they lived in the area and they got together themselves, and they had one boat.